“the institution may overshadow the work” : Synecdoche, Milan. Augustas Serapinas at Fondazione ICA Milano

Augustas Serapinas, “Wooden Travel”, installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. Melania Dalle Grave DSL Studio, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano

By LUCA AVIGO March 8, 2025

“In form and design and scale and structure and proportion I've yet to see an example of the old work that was not perfectly executed. They were designed by the men who built them and their design rose out of necessity. The beauty of those structures would appear to be just a sort of a by-product, something fortuitous, but of course it is not. The aim of the mason was to make the wall stand up and that was his purpose in its entirety. The beauty of the stonework is simply a reflection of the purity of the mason's intention.”

Thus, Cormac McCarthy praises the art of vernacular construction in The Stonemason (1994). His words strongly resonate with the practice of Augustas Serapinas (1990), even though stones are not seen in his latest exhibition Wooden Travel—only the titular wood. “In Lithuania, compared to Italy, we don’t have much stone available; so, we have always built with wood,” explains Serapinas. This is why the large space at ICA Foundation in Milan, open until March 15, exhibits two long log walls, connected transversally to form an S shape.

Augustas Serapinas, “Wooden Travel”, installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. Melania Dalle Grave DSL Studio, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano

This is House from Gaidalaučizna, a site-specific work assembled in loco by the artist himself — videos show Serapinas wielding an axe in one hand, carving the trunks to make them fit in place. Though every intervention by the artist is purely functional and invisible, if not for the video footage: the architecture appears to have aged in that place, judging by the cobwebs and sawdust produced by drywood termites. If you’re lucky, you might even spot a centipede scurrying between the trunks (really). Nothing would suggest that they traveled 1,587 km, the distance between southern Milan and Gaidalaučizna, a settlement 70 km north of Vilnius, Serapinas' hometown. Try searching for Gaidalaučizna on Google Maps: the satellite images show an intersection of two narrow streets (too small for Street View), around where it seems that 17 houses are located, judging by the sharp shadow of the steep roofs typical of vienkiemis, which roughly translates to "single-family home". That’s what the architecture exhibited at ICA once was.

Proliferating since 1907 due Stolypin's agrarian land reform, which fragmented villages into land plots, single-family homes drastically decreased after World War II because of Soviet collectivization and urbanization policies. In 1944 there were 300,000 vienkiemis in Lithuania; by 1990 only a third of them remained standing. Since then, the population has decreased by a quarter, further contributing to the abandonment of the Vienkiemis, which now dot the natural landscape—when they’re not sold as firewood on sites like skelbiu.lt, where anyone can buy them, provided the buyer dismantles and removes the building themselves. Which is exactly what Serapinas has been doing for years.

Looking again at the satellite images of Gaidalaučizna, in fact, around the vienkiemis, there are what seem to be, by shape and size, traces of vanished houses. Could one of these have been left by the artwork? More likely, judging by the date of the latest Google Maps images (2021) and that of the artwork (2024), House from Gaidalaučizna is one of the houses still standing.

Augustas Serapinas. courtesy the artist

Hard to find which one, since now it has little semblance of a house: the roof is missing, the walls do not create rooms and the gaps in them do not create windows, the shutters are hung on blind walls and the cornices lay vertically. It looks like a deconstruction of a house rather than a reconstruction. The recontextualization and recomposition overlap the two layers of the content—the authentic traditional dwelling, where someone actually lived—and the container—the museum space and the aura that envelops the objects inside it. In a cohesion of radically opposed contexts and times, Lithuanian vernacular architecture takes on the characteristics of minimalist sculpture, the logs stacked for housing necessities becoming a direct reference to Carl Andre’s wooden compositions.

The same applies to Wooden house fragment and Wooden house ornament, new works by Serapinas, who imitates the raw vernacular aesthetics for a purpose diametrically opposite to domestic decoration. This is also true of Roof of a House from Meškauščizna, square sections of charred roof hung on the walls, becoming perfect black monochromes. It’s an old Baltic technique to burn wood to preserve it from weather and pests, but as Serapinas explains, “it’s not suitable to do that with the roof. I’m doing that deliberately.” By consciously repeating traditional processes in this new context, the artist entrusts it to preserve not only the physical products but also the very act of vernacular construction and the invaluable popular knowledge it represents (the same knowledge McCarthy writes about), passed down through generations for centuries and now suddenly at risk.

Augustas Serapinas, “Wooden Travel”, installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. Melania Dalle Grave DSL Studio, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano

Serapinas has often been associated with the field of relational aesthetics, a term born with the 1998 book by Nicolas Bourriaud, who theorized an art that communicates not through material objects, but through interaction with and among visitors. Sometimes he fits this definition perfectly, such as when he collaborated with the technical manager of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp to open an unexplored recess of the building to the public through a hole in one of the exhibition hall walls. However, Wooden Travel is an exhibition closed in on itself, defined and fixed. In relational terms, it makes the audience feel like spectators, not participants. In other instances of his practice, the relation Serapinas establishes concerns the context of the art space, as when he exhibited frescoes being restored from a church near the Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia or security walkways produced by a neighboring company to the David Dale Gallery in Glasgow. But in Milan, there is no inspiration from the surroundings of the Foundation. 

If anything, Wooden Travel seems inspired by the images of Thomas Struth and Thomas Demand, who, in a clinical representation of architecture—whether it be deserted urban streets or replicas of places from our collective consciousness—aim to make explicit the historical and social content embodied by the architecture. But what if the connection were not with an element of the context, but with the context itself? “More than a restoration, [...] we could perhaps talk about recovery.” Studio LGB’s words about their ICA Foundation project could not describe the work the Foundation itself now exhibits any better. Couldn’t it be Serapinas speaking of “giving up a false discretion” to “approach the essential of a building”? Explaining that “the project process, step by step, was driven by a question that was neither ‘Does it work?’ nor ‘Do we like it?’ but only ‘Do we need it?’”. Wooden Travel seems then to directly face the criticism Claire Bishop made regarding relational aesthetics, quoting Hal Foster’s concern that “the institution may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the spectacle.”

Thus, House from Gaidalaučizna serves as a stand-in for the institution itself, as an architecture left behind by progress (in the case of Milan’s ICA, abandoned for over 30 years), absorbed and fossilized by the art system. And in the exhibition space, all of a sudden, one feels enclosed in the interstice between two matryoshka dolls. It makes you wonder whether the exhibition curator Chiara Nuzzi was speaking of a Lithuanian Vienkiemis or the ICA Foundation itself when she states that Serapinas performs a “taxonomy of architecture”. Be it early 1900s Lithuanian hand-cut logs or 1950s Italian industrial boom brick and concrete, whatever is left behind by development, art happily eats it all and spits it out for us to see. WM